SUnSET - On the Suitability of USDL for Service Description - A case study of a telecom operator

Abstract

During the last decades there has been tremendous growth in the services sector. This event was due to the great technological advancement that was given in communications and devices where the Internet was one of the reasons for this to happen. Through this, both consumers and companies managed a way to be always connected to any place and person. This led to an increasingly appearance of di erent services, such as Cloud services. Nowadays, companies have turned to the Cloud to reduce costs by outsourcing their non-core competencies or betting on new di erentiating services. The Cloud has allowed the emergence of new companies, increasing quality of services provided as well as allowing greater competition. However, this increase of services has led to it being too complicated to nd and compare. To solve this problem it is necessary to be able to describe the service and its features, both in a functional and non-functional way. This means that languages such as WSDL are not su cient, because they are not able to capture and describe a complete service o er. It is crucial to have a language that can capture these aspects so important to the consumer. As such, we used USDL to describe the services from the business, operational and technical perspective. After we described this services they are ready to be on a common place and with easy access to the consumer. In order to outline this problem services marketplace were created so that all of them can be on a single distribution channel. Nowadays, service marketplaces are increasingly wherein each marketplace has its own way of describing services. The lack of use non-standard languages or with a large degree of dissemination for services description reduced the ability of marketplace interoperability with other internal and external information systems. With this thesis we propose to provide methods and tools to do a Export/Import application for services described in SAPO proprietary data scheme into USDL as well as the reverse actions. This document is the nal report that will be presented in September 2013.